Sunday, June 23, 2013

Hey-ho. Finally, the biggest part of renovation is done. Our kitchen is 90% completed, so is the living room. I have now a completely new hobbyspace, much more storage space, a bright painting area besides the window plus a glass showcase so that my figures have no longer to hide inside a closed cabinet.

You cannot imagine how happy I am with that. I'm no longer depending on plastic boxes.

I'm still a little bit low on time - not much time for painting. I have currently the French hussars and some grenadier conversions (Kingdom of Holland) on my desk, hoping to get them finished within the next one or two weeks.

By the way, I finished the Tirailleurs du Po for my pre-Bardin uniform project:

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a picture of an officer for that unit, therefore it's only a group of three.

Oh - and, as promised, I'd like to present you some pictures of the 33rd French regiment in white uniforms. The grenadier is still missing, I know. I'm still not sure if I paint a bearskin or a shako version - I have pictures of both and I'm yet not sure which one I'd like to take.

Oh my. These colours! X-D
Well - painting the kingdom of Holland infantry, I'm now facing pink and light purple, which also looks a little bit odd when combined with white. I hope to get these grenadiers ready soon - it will be another great display.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

In the beginning, I didn't even care
about base making. Then I started to make bases in order to make my
project units transportable and more presentable. Then I got into
that competition thing, saw all those nice little dioramas and found
it interesting to create such little vignettes as well.

One of the things that are vital for
larger vignettes are trees and bushes. Two years ago, I watched a
workshop on how to build trees on basis of a wire framework, held by
Das_Dirk (http://dirchs-modellbauwelt.jimdo.com/)
who is also a member of Bennos' forum. These trees looked great, but
when I tried to make one, I ended up with... well... wire scrap. So I
threw it all apart and concentrated on other things. At FIGZ 2012, I
bought a single figure and spontaneously had a scenery in mind –
unfortunately, this scenery would require a tree of some size. I
looked around, but all ready-made trees available on the market
looked either odd or where ridiculously expensive. With a little luck
I managed to get an individual one – made by another great modeller
whos' work can be seen on
http://bookman-miniaturen.blogspot.de/2012/09/baume.html

Well. So far, so good. As I told you, I
bought some nice hussar miniatures at FIGZ in Arnhem recently. Again,
I had a special scenery in my mind, which would require some smaller
trees and bushes for the hussar scouts to hide between. Mmph. Tree
building problem again.

Nothing against the arts of Bookman –
but I found it way too expensive to have all the required plants to
be made. I saw the cool trees that Ralf presented at FIGZ and
suggested these to be a real solution. I tried to bribe the guys
(Ralf and Dirk) to make some trees for me, but they refused. I
suspect that they wanted me to do it all on my own. So that's where I
started.

Following the advice of Ralf, I bought
myself some things:

NOCH 23100 Nature trees

a small can of UHU sprayable glue

a bag of sawdust, which I got for
free at the local tool market

Price: around 20 Euro. Which doesn't
seem bad for approximately 30 trees/bushes.

Look at the amount of basic material in the box:

So how does it work? Very fast and
simple.

At first, I prepared two smaller nature
tree parts, cut off lower branches, etc. Smaller trees usually don't
have an expanded rootage and as the trees will be simply sticked into
the basing material, it was not needed to create a rootage base at
all.

First step: I brushed the trunks with
wood glue and then dispersed sawdust upon them. Laying on my desk,
they had time to dry out overnight.

Next day, I carefully took them up with
a plier and sprayed the glue upon the branches. The UHU spray glue
works out fine – nearly pinpoint accuracy. I just dispersed some
artificial foliage material onto the branches, blowed away the loose
parts and – here you are, two small trees!

Well – I have to clean away the green
parts that by mistake attached to the trunk and then drybrush the
whole thing. Next time, I'm going to paint the trunks and branches
before applying the foliage. That will certainly look much better,
but for the start, I'm pretty happy with the results. Thanks for the
inspiration, Ralf!

Sunday, June 2, 2013

This has been a really great day. Unfortunately, this years' FIGZ is now over, but it was - again - a pleasure to be there and meet so many nice hobbyists. My special dedication goes out to Remco and Benno from http://www.bennosfiguresforum.com/ who - again - hosted a really good miniature event.

I put a lot of photos into the aftershow-threat at Bennos' forum: http://www.bennosfiguresforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=14096 where you can see pictures of other visitors as well (hopefully all people will have put their pictures into that section soon).
I've also posted there the pictures of all competition entries. Bad for me, the jury liked dwarfes and elves more then goats. MEH!

Well - no matter what, I said I'd paint a goat and I kept my word doing so. X-D
The figure is one that was left from the test sprues that Francesco (http://franznap.com/) gave me back at FIGZ 2012, a French lancer of the line. The goat is from the Pegasus farm set.

Thanks to Ralf, Dirk and Conny I learned some new things and will shortly start my very own tree-building experiments - the raw-materials are already ordered. I need to build a handful of trees in order to place my new figures between them:

French elite company hussars from ART miniatures. Finally, light infantry that deserves the name - being on scouting duty and not wavering sabres in that stupid full-charge-whatsoever-action. :-DI have something really nice in mind, hopefully my limited diorama building abilities will do fine.

In some, I spend around 50 bucks on brushes, figures and coffee. Now ISSC Heiden will be my next event of this year. And I very luckily look forward towards FIGZ2014.
Time enough to prepare new beautiful things to exhibit. Which means: it's back to the brushes.

About Me

I've been born in 1974, I'm married for more than ten years with a hyper-creative woman and I'm the father of two wonderful boys.
Naturally, that doesn't leave much daytime for any hobby. Painting miniatures is my way of relaxation. My addiction, to be honest.
I'm in this hobby again for nearly two years now. It all started when my Dad bought a plastic kit of a Mitsubishi Zero when I was six years old. First, he build planes for me, later I did it on my own. My first ESCI box of British infantry came to me when I was around 14 years old. I must confess that I painted it lousily, but back then, I liked them very much.
Now, after all these years in which I preferred computer games, girls, parties and doing nonsense, I slowly started to settle down again - and back came the little plastic dudes.
I consider myself being an apprentice in these arts. There's so much more to learn! So I hope you enjoy this place and my works and maybe it's a way of exchanging inspiration. Please feel free to leave comments!